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Homoerotic Bonding as Escape from Heterosexual Responsibility in Pynchon's Slow Learner - Thomas Pynchon
Style, Fall, 2000 by Mark D. Hawthorne
For contrast, Pynchon introduces Callisto in this nurturing role: "The first thing he became aware of was a small bird he had been holding gently between his hands, against his body" (83). Like Meatball, Callisto treats women as objects. For her part, Aubade takes dictation from Callisto as if she had nothing to say on her own and obeys his commands as if he alone could reach a significant conclusion. In other words, he occupies the same sort of ambiguous gender space as Meatball for both men exercise masculine dominance even while they attempt to fill a feminine sustaining role. But in that latter role, when Callisto fails to save the dying bird, no "horrifying awareness" comes to him; rather, it comes to Aubade. "Impotent with the wonder of it," Callisto cannot understand why his nurturing has not saved the bird, but Aubade acts:
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Suddenly then, as if seeing the single and unavoidable conclusion to all this she moved swiftly to the window before Callisto could speak; tore away the drapes and smashed out the glass with two exquisite hands which came away bleeding and glistening with splinters. (98)
Callisto moves toward feminization; Aubade is masculinized. Both movements are necessary for entropy; they cancel one another.
Conflating homosexual desire and misogyny, Pynchon's protagonists construct a masculine prerogative to control and vitiate the treat of femininity. In "The Small Rain," Levine's army buddies turn the "coeds" of McNeese into sex objects; in "Low-lands," Dennis tells his homosocial buddies a story about a female cadaver and the fraternity that uses it to embarrass a drunken brother (68-69); and in "The Secret Integration," Grover and Tim accept Kim Dufay only after Kim proves her masculine acceptability by outmaneuvering Hogan in spying on the PTA (155). In all these stories, males masculinize or objectify women to preserve supremacy, especially after they have themselves become feminized through the implicit homosexualization of their bonding. Such feminized males displace the internalized threat of being effeminate by reducing women to still more inferior positions. For these males, it is as if the (gender) threat of being feminine were greater than the (sexual) fear of being perceived as homosexual.
Still, there is little overt homophobia in these stories. Quite the contrary, fear takes the shape of the male's fleeing the responsibilities and limitations of heterosexual domination by escaping into homosocial bonding through which he maintains a fragile--though psychologically safe--space where he remains a boy. Though natural forces like hurricanes and rain, the changes of socially imposed rules and expectations, lack of communication, racism, and ageism threaten this space, the male protagonists find there the freedom to play out their fantasies, to indulge the feminine within their masculinity, and to indulge in same-sex bonding that excludes heterosexual desires.
Neither androgynous nor bisexual, this space is one in which binary categories, largely supported by and forming the content of adult authoritarianism, simply dissolve. The symbolism of "boys will be boys" is especially appropriate, for the space is, indeed, preoedipal. In "Low-lands," Dennis wants to return to mother (in his case, the mother sea) and escape his responsibilities as wage-earner, husband, and potential father; in the uncollected "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna," Siegel temporarily takes on the role of "Father" confessor but escapes the responsibility of trying to save the other people in the apartment from Loon; although in "The Secret Integration," the boys return to the protection of their homes, they had rebelled against the prejudice those homes engender. In each story in a variety of ways, adult or mature women threaten Pynchon' s males. When Cindy throws Dennis out of the house, he must try to find happiness with the childlike Nerissa; when Levine has sex with a nondemanding woman who cal ls herself "little Buttercup," he must wear during the sex act a baseball cap and puffs on a cigar as if he needs these props to be dominant (50); when Mrs. Barrington shocks Grover and Tim from their fantasy, she triggers their reversion to childhood; when, wanting a sex object, Debby Considine brings Irving Loon from the Canadian forests to Washington, he becomes a mass murderer.
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